Hi,
This is a QA Review comment for "XHTML 2.0"
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xhtml2-20060726/
2006-07-26
8th WD
About http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xhtml2-20060726/mod-roleAttribute.html#s_roleAttributemodule
There will be confusion in the community about the exact usage of role, property and class which seem to cover very similar goal. Reading the specification, a few times it's still not clear what are the abstract definition of each of them
role = QNames
This attribute describes the role(s) the current
element plays in the context of the document. It
is used by applications and assistive technologies
to determine the purpose of UI widgets.
property = QName
This attribute indicates which property is being
defined by the element. If it is not specified,
the property is reference.
class = NMTOKENS
This attribute assigns one or more class names to
an element; the element may be said to belong to
these classes. A class name may be shared by
several element instances.
rel = QName
This attribute describes the relationship between
the resource specified by the about attribute
(or its default value) and the resource referred
to by the href attribute.
The way it is said in the specification, it leads to believe that
role is for widgets/behaviour
property is for semantics
class is for style?
rel/rev is for relationship between documents.
Many attributes with definition which seems to be overlapping sometimes.
But it makes it a little bit awkward to have property and class. class is already use for semantics in the microformats community and in many cases outside of this community. Why not giving the definition of property to the class attributes, will it create specific problems?
In the wiki page http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-example1-steps
assume that "class <=> property"
<p class="vevent" href="http://www.web2con.com/">
<span class="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>:
<span class="dtstart" content="2005-10-05">October 5</span>-
<span class="dtend" content="2005-10-08">7</span>,
at the <span class="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span>
</p>
The content attribute here solves an abuse by the microformat community which puts accessibility users at risk.
--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
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